In Which Tennessee Re-Writes Its Textbooks

Clio, Muse of History — also known by her Marvel Comics name, The Proclaimer (!) — is one of the blog's special contributors. (We don't have as many as MSNBC does but, then again, almost nobody does. I swear there's a guy pumping gas in Oregon who is an MSNBC special contributor and doesn't even know it.) Occasionally, though, something like this happens and we lose contact with Clio and the staff here at the blog gets worried.

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One thing we know about The Founders is that they didn't want to be fetishized as any more than what they were — fallible men with some really great ideas, as well as some pretty terrible ones. (Well, John Adams, that impossible old blatherskite, might have wanted himself cast in marble.) Which is why my brain always begins to hurt when I contemplate the Tea Party goobers, with their knee-britches and tricorns and "reverence" for "the Constitution," as though it were a book of conjurin' spells handed down from their snake-handling grandpappies, rather than the world's greatest example of The Best We Could Do And You Folks Can Fix It Later. (And, in Tennessee, The Stupid is very strong in these people.) Lewis Lapham once wrote disparagingly of the country's "wish for kings." This is worse, and toweringly pathetic. This is a wish for superheroes. This turns every history teacher, and every historian, into the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, and the Constitutional Convention into the Green Lantern Corps:

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group's lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

"Intruding"? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Or what Custer thought it meant, either.

"No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Let us recap, shall we, since we don't have Clio to do it for us? This cluck doesn't want the fact that many of the Founders owned slaves to obscure their other contributions. He finds it, I dunno, disrespectful or something. Can we recall that Thomas Paine said of John Adams that, "It has been the political career of this man to begin with hypocrisy, proceed with arrogance, and finish with contempt."

In 1800, the Jefferson campaign called Adams "a hideous hermaphroditical character," and the Adams campaign responded by predicting that Jefferson's election would occasion circumstance under which, "Murder, rape, robbery, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced," and these two guys wound up liking each other. And let's not even get into that little scuffle in Weehawken between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. I mean, if these guys could say these things about each other, then we can certainly point out 200 years later that some of them owned other human beings as property and this was a practice somewhat in conflict with those values that they'd so proudly preached to the world. Even at the time, it occurred to Samuel Johnson to ask, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Stay out of Tennessee, Sam.

And Clio, Muse of History, walks to the highest tower she can find, chases 25 Xanax with a bottle of Woodford's Special Reserve, and wonders if she can fly.